The Half Life of Time

I often have a hard time deciding where to start. I think that is why, so often, I immediately segue into work. Work is an easy place to start. So, let’s skip the easy place today and start someplace else.

I just finished a wonderful bath. It was hot and filled with some sort of lavender scented bath milk. Lately, when I bathe I’ve been setting a timer beside the bathtub. It serves two purposes. First, it makes sure I don’t stay in the bath too long. Second, it makes sure that I stay in the bath long enough.

Time is a pretty amazing thing. I am often dazzled by the thousand different rules that seem to govern the passage of time. I can also be mesmerized thinking about the past and the future and the present and their complex relationship.

I periodically tell my friends that lately perhaps for the last couple of years, I have been semi-obsessed with lost time. Lost time is that time between events when you are not doing anything but you are also not not doing anything. It is time spent in sort of a half-life. I think I spend way too much time there. Those times when you are not fully present but you are also not not present. The half-life of time.

When Time and Timing Go Awry

I’ve been thinking about Sunday, when I was swirled up around questions of time and timing.  As I was taking a morning walk, I came to the conclusion that part of my problem (and part of the solution) is that I don’t intervene when I see things going awry.  On Sunday, I had choices and the ability to make those choices - and yet I didn’t - I let those choices be made for me.  Consequently I had a very cranky day.  I need to make the choice to intervene when I see things going awry with time and timing.

 

 

Time to Savor the Time

Weather-wise, it's a beautiful California evening.  I had a simple dinner of sliders with bleu cheese and a salad, chased by a small piece of chocolate cake, an indulgence.  I've got an episode of "The Blacklist" off the DVR running and my plan tonight is to split my time between personal things and working some back logged email. I've got a three day weekend coming up and I am actually hoping to take all three days off.

It's been a long time since I haven't worked on the weekend - either hours of actual keyboard time or hours of thinking and planning around work. I definitely feel like my work has become a big intrusion on my personal life and I am not really sure how to work my way around and out of it.  Today was a classic example - I am behind the eight ball on various project related things and yet my own management keeps assigning me additional things and telling me "this is a high priority - do this right away" - and I am sure on the flip-side of the day they'll then want to know why I didn't finish my other projects.  It is a challenging environment, that is for sure

I would like to find my way out of this particular wilderness, but I am not sure how.  My upper management (whom I hold in low regard) asked for feedback on how to resolve some of these issues and I took the time to write up my suggestions.  At the end of the day, they halfway implemented one of them.  The reason, I think, is because it is not a problem they experience, they doubt the reality of it.

Well, let me return to this beautiful California evening and settle in to enjoy my television show.  Time to savor the time.

The Chief Beauty About Time

“The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance.  The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life.  You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.” - Arnold Bennett

Semi-Random Monday Thoughts

Naturally, after I went to bed early last night, I woke up early this morning.  I dreamed last night, but I don't recall the content of the dream, only knowing, on waking, that I had dreamed. I like the still hours of the morning, when it is dark outside, when you can hear the world waking up. It is the perfect time to have a cup of coffee and just savor the moment.

I had a strange thought this morning, or I wondered if it was a strange thought, I wondered if I am entering a midlife crisis, given the assorted challenges I've been feeling at work.  I have been there for thirteen years, going on sixteen if I count the three years I spent there as a contractor.  That is a long time and it is possible that I am simply ready for a change.  There is a change coming, and I hope the end of it is going to be good, but the change is that the company has sold the building we're in.  So that means, sometime over the next year, odds are we are going to move to another location.  I hope it goes well - and I am actually looking forward to it. I really don't like my current office - we are deep in the interior of the building, so that means there is no natural light, at all, in our work area.

I also wonder if that awareness of the passage of time is starting to weigh heavier upon me, psychologically.  I certainly have an awareness of lost time, stronger then I used to.  Specifically, the time that I am often most aware of is the "time in between", that is the time that is wasted in between doing the things that I enjoy doing.  There is a surprising amount of it to me and I am very aware of it.  Still, it seems to just slip away.

Ah well, today is going to be a full day, so I think it is time for me to start my morning by splashing through the shower.  I am deep in Grove Park envy this morning.

The Last Drops of Rain

The soundtrack of the last week or so has been Melissa Etheridge's new album, "4th Street Feeling". It is outstanding, a solid collection, through and through.  Her talent never ceases to amaze me. She writes and sings songs that capture the bittersweet nature of life in a true and honest fashion. I'll probably share the lyrics of some of the songs as I go through the weeks ahead.

The currents of life have been surging around me the last couple of months, with unexpected developments in all aspects of my life. A few years ago and the stress and emotionality of it would have been crushing, but I give a lot of credit to that stress counselor I went to two years ago for reminding me of many of the things I know about managing stress. Layer that on top of the journey I have been on toward a minimal lifestyle and exploring zen and...I still feel the currents, the emotions are as strong as they have ever been, they pull me this way and that, but I do not feel as if they buffet me.

I got an unexpected call tonight that has been, basically, two years in the coming I think. A conversation that has been had a dozen times, with an ending that never was, and tonight, well, tonight might have been the ending. It might have been that last tide that crashes ashore and then ebbs slowly back into the sea. I am sure I am going to write more about it in the coming days, writing that I may or may not share.  But, between there and here I have shed a thousand tears and the tears that remain are like the last drops of rain, that fall, softly to the ground.

Take All The Time...

I had one of those events that leads the average worker to hold management in low regard.  Last week I went through a series of three day meetings that focused on transition planning and the transition process.  We reviewed the high level transition schedule and reached (I thought) consensus on the timing.  Basically, senior management emphasized that it was important to "do it right" and "take the necessary time" to insure a complete and successful transition.  They stated "we don't want to hurry it".  All heads nodded.

Fast forward to this week and suddenly - they want the transition done by the end of March.  Somehow they expected to transition 12 years of knowledge and experience, literally hundreds of nuances and incidents and events, in twenty working days, while everyone does their other, full time job.  The ensuing discussion was not pretty and I continued to advocate a more orderly, deliberate transition.  I have no idea if I am going to win the argument, but I have got my opening salvo out there. In pursuit of the truth, I can freely admit that - if they decide to short the transition on time I am perfectly fine with that.  I simply want them to understand that it will be choppy and incomplete, with certain items falling by the wayside.

I have long held the opinion that slow and deliberate is, in the end, faster than fast and chaotic.  It is one of the paradoxes of both work and life - go slow to go fast.  You should approach transitions like a distance race, not a sprint - be slow, be deliberate, be complete - and in the end you will be successful before you would have been if you tried to hurry. My thoughts tonight are flowing around work, but at the same time, that process - go slow to go fast - holds true on many fronts.

On the personal level, other then good conversations and time spent with TR and the occasional movie, dinner, reading - there really hasn't been a lot of time for personal issues in the last couple of weeks. I am hoping to move through this week without over-working myself, and so far, so good.  Yesterday, I got wrapped up and carried a heavy load of stress into the evening and from there into the night. I tossed and turned during the night and each time I woke my brain was spinning around work related items, which I personally dislike.  I feel like I am in a little bit of a better place tonight, having had a fairly productive day focused on two items (transition details and a particular project).  I am looking forward to a quiet evening tonight, maybe a little online, maybe a little reading, maybe "Spartacus: Vengeance" on DVR.

Deliberate Things

Time flies. A familiar theme of mine. The last week or so has basically flown by on the swift wings of many incidental things and few deliberate things. However, entering today, I feel as if I have accomplished the many incidental things and can comfortably move toward the few deliberate things.

Actually, sitting here, belly full of a mediocre seafood alfredo, I think that would be a good new years resolutions. To try and make 2012 the year of a few deliberate things. The only remaining question would then be - what should those deliberate things be?

I want to continue forward in the journey of simplicity. I want to spend more time reading. I want to focus more on work. I want to focus more on writing. Will that be enough deliberate things? Or too many? I suppose it is something I should deliberate on.
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A Semi-Obsession With Time

I spent another day semi-obsessed by questions of time. I have a prevailing sense that I do not have enough time, or that time is slipping through my fingers, or that I am not spending my time wisely. I am not sure what drives this semi-obsession - yeah, work is a little hectic and I am behind the eight-ball there, but really, almost no more that usual. In particular I have one report that I have to assemble and analyze and I just wasn't able to get to it during the week, and I have another small project where, basically, I am two weeks behind schedule - but that project is low enough on the radar that the only one noticing the slip so far has been me. It is that huge challenge I have at work being caught between the two masters - the short and immediate cycle of customer support and the longer and deeper cycle of project work. We're waiting for the re-organization shoe to drop and I'm hope that I will ultimately end up doing one or the other, so I can properly focus on it.

But this sense of time I have, it is more of a sense that i am not using the time I have wisely, that it slips away from me, that there are things that I want to do that I am simply short on time to do. I am well aware of the element of it that involves choices, but it seems to me that, all in all, I make fairly good choices. It is a puzzlement, that is for sure.

Other than my semi-obsession with time, it was a good day. I slept in, until about 6:45 AM, which is late for me, lazed through the early morning, then met my friends for breakfast. From there, I took a walk through the electronics store, the visited for a while, then ran three loads of laundry through, then socialized for four or five hours in the afternoon, then a dinner of potato pancakes and scrambled eggs, followed by the short drive home on a dark and cool night. All of that journey of the day brings me right here, right into this moment. I can here the clock ticking away the seconds as I sit here in silence, the clock ticking competing with the ticking of the keys on the computer.

I am not sure what I am going to do into the evening here, I think I will see what is on TV, then spend some time reading, then spend some wonderful time talking with T.R., and then just ease into a deep and rich nights worth of sleep. When I look back on the day I see a day well spend, balanced, productive, social and now reflective, so I am not really sure where the semi-obsession with time is coming from, other than - somewhere, somewhere inside of me, time is on my mind.

(The eye image is from http://www.arcus.org.)

The Synchronicity of Stones

I had a flash of insight over the weekend. I was thinking about the challenges that I seem to be running up against in the last couple of months and I realized that I am struggling to keep things in perspective. I am letting small stones in the river detract from the beauty and experience of the river.

I feel as if I am living in a half-state. As if I am waiting for "the other shoe to drop", rather than just charging ahead and not worrying about that other shoe. It related back to my ongoing struggles with, with the sense that I simply don't have enough time.

However, wrapped in the realization of that, I also realize that I have all the time I am ever going to have - I'm just not spending it well. I keep letting myself get pulled into this half-state of waiting. And I am not really waiting for anything specific. I need to find within me that old source of reckless courage.

Along that theme today, as I was pulling together a quote related to work, I came across this in an act of synchronicity:

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." -Life's Little Instruction Book.

Quoted on http://exploreforayear.com/clarity/45-inspiring-quotes-change

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One Week Later - Time Flies

It was a sudden week. When I glanced at my blog I realized that it had been seven days since I wrote. There were a couple of reasons for that – I went up to Wondercon in San Francisco with friends for a three day weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), and then worked pretty intensively over the last three days (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday).

My manager is currently out of the office, so I caught about a 30% workload increase. Most of it has manifested as doing my “normal” work during the day, then spending a couple of hours each evening plowing through email. My managers principle job is communication and program direction, so I’ve been lucky there – it is sufficiently different from what I do (analysis, design and support) that there really isn’t an overlap.

Last night was the first real night where I had sufficient time to do incidental things around the apartment – which turned out to mainly be scrubbing the stove top and over. I happen to like the Zen simplicity of cleaning.

Today is effectively my Friday (tomorrow is my regularly scheduled day off). I am planning on easing through the day, maybe with some additional house work, laundry, and then a matinee movie. I have to admit, I want to see “Your Highness”, the fantasy spoof. It looks like it will be amusing. I could be wrong though. That is the challenge of movies – you just never quite know what you’re getting into.

I am currently listening to a generic teleconference at work and I have it on mute. It is one of those “listen only” teleconferences that permeate the working world. The first presenter blazed through her presentation, almost as if she was speaking as fast as she possible could. It was very amusing, in an unintentional sort of way.

I guess I really don’t have anything focused to say in this particular entry, other than to mention a phrase that has been bouncing around in my brain for the last couple of days – the phrase is “provisional brilliance”. I am not really sure what it means, so I am going to keep mulling it around for a while and see what pops out.

Question Number Three

I had decided to call today the first official day of fall in this part of California. We had an unseasonably early rain storm last night and so when I awoke this morning it felt like fall. That feeling lingered through the day. Work was productive but both low energy and low key. The evening was nice, a hearty baked potato soup and a sandwich, then a lazy evening playing on the computer and listening to music, followed by good conversation with T.R. Let me dive right into Question Number Three:

If life is so short, why do we do so many things we don’t like and like so many things we don’t do?

Personally speaking, I don’t do many things I don’t like. It was a long journey to get the point where I can say that and it is a journey that I am still on. In the early nineties I was totally burnt out on many things and fortune conspired to give me an opportunity to take a rambling road trip of multiple destinations and multiple months and in that trip to contemplate, well, pretty much everything. Out of that trip came three simple decisions that have been guideposts for the rest of my life. One of those decisions was this – I would never again do anything I didn’t want to do. I’ve abided by that to a great extent. The few times I have not, I have regretted it.

Now, the second part of the question is a little tougher. For me the answer is this – there are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a week, so many weeks in a month and so many months in a year. The spirit may be willing and unlimited, but the world is limited, limited in resources, limited in time. As Ovid said – “Tempus Edax Rerum” – time devours all things. The limitations I feel are largely structural and mechanical limitations. For example, I may want to go to Las Vegas – but it takes a certain amount of time and consumes a certain amount of resources to do so, so I lay that up against my other choices, which are often equal in value to me, and I choose to do those things that bring me more happiness within the constraints of my resources.

Also, I will take a moment to disagree with the entire premise of this question – that life is short. As a matter of faith I believe that we are each possessed with an immortal soul that passes through this incredible journey for eternity. We have all the time in the universe. The experience of life is specific and local, but that life occurs within the framework of the quantum universe where all manner of strange and mysterious things can and do occur. I may not make it to Las Vegas because of the specific and local objects and events. But, in the big scope of things, that really doesn’t matter – I am sure that I will go out and have an equally wondrous time. The mystery and the wonder of the universe are everywhere. Everywhere.

Daily Life: Anticipating A Timeless Weekend

It has been a very good week, all in all. It has been quiet and productive and now the day is spinning slowly down. I came into work early this morning, precisely so I could leave in the middle of the afternoon and start the weekend a little early. I just wrapped up my last formal meeting of the day and I am now spending the time cleaning up those odds and ends of bureaucratic life that are always necessary. They are as pointless to rail against as the weather - like the rain, like the sun, they just are. You learn to adapt to them or they make your days miserable.

It is my three day weekend and I haven't quite decided what I am going to do. I am mulling over a run up to Sacramento (about a two hour plus drive) to see a Maxfield Parrish exhibit that opened up today at the Crocker Art Museum. If I do I think I will probably spend the night up there and drop over to the Indian casino at Cache Creek and make a donation to the local tribe. I downloaded a little video poker game to my iPhone a couple of weeks ago and it has been a constant source of amusement in those quiet moments of the day that fall in between other things and has made me want to go spend some time sitting in front of a real video poker machine.

I am contemplating dinner but I haven't decided which direction I am going to go. I was thinking about going out, over to Thea Mediterranean or one of the other restaurants in Santana Row, but then my brain started swinging toward opening the apartment up wide and ordering a pizza. I have Yojimbo on DVR and I have been waiting for a window to watch it and tonight might be the perfect evening.

On the technical front I may have finally figured out what has been causing my connectivity problems at home. The personal laptop was acting up over a couple of days this last week, with intermittent connectivity problems. I was blaming my personal laptop so last night I fired up my personal desktop, which I rarely use except for big things, and that sent me in the direction of a bad router configuration. So I fired up my monitoring tools and my network monitoring tool couldn't pick up my wireless router (even though the other tools said it was up and running properly) so I purged the router, restarted it, and reconfigured it and as of last night - it was working like a charm, so I suspect it was a corrupted configuration file somewhere along the line. Of course, sometimes, with all computer equipment , you just have to reboot everything.

I am nearly to the end of "Spook Country" and it has been excellent - William Gibson at his finest. (He has written a couple of works that just did not impress me. "Virtual Light" was basically a movie treatment and way too Hollywood and "Idoru" was basically incoherent.) I see Clive Cussler has a new one coming out for the summer markets, so I am looking forward to that. My step-dad Bill turned me on Cussler a couple of years back, so I enjoy reading him.

I'm enjoying going into the weekend with all my options open, with nothing outside of a load of laundry or two that has to be done. I could be really lazy and bag the laundry and drop it off at the cleaners, but I happened to enjoy the Zen aspects of doing laundry. That timeless sense you get when you are doing an essentially simple task and can concentrate on the task itself. I think it is going to be a Zen weekend, just going with the flow.

Sharing: Biocentrism

My friend Don at work sent me this article about biocentrism and time.

Here is an excerpt:

But change is not the same thing as time. Everything we perceive is actively being reconstructed inside our heads. Time in this sense can be defined as the summation of spatial states--much like in a film--occurring inside the mind. So what is real? If the next mental image is different from the last, then it is different, period. We can award that change with the word time but that doesn't mean there is an actual invisible matrix in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things.

This is a link to the article.

Daily Life: I Lost Myself

Something happened to me today that has not happened to me in a long time. It was kinda cool. It was simple - I was at work and I was working on designing a little piece of software for a project I have and I got lost in it. By lost I mean I lost track of time, I was so totally engrossed in it. I would have been going far to late had not one of the people who works for me stopped by to say goodnight, and then a moment later I got a text that also helped pull me back into the world. It has been a long time since I was totally engrossed in something and I lost track of time. It was pretty cool. I liked the feeling.

Currently in the Future

"History is everything that isn't current or in the future."

"No, history is everything that is current and in the past."

"What about the future, is it current, because the future is there now?"

"Well, no, it's there now but it is still in the future."

"It's currently in the future than?"

"Yes, history is everything that is current and in the past and is not
in the future, even if it is currently in the future."

"Got it."

"Okay, can anyone actually repeat what was just said, because I am
currently confused and I suspect I am going to be confused in the
future too."

I wish I could make stuff like that up. I suspect sometimes I work for
Abbott & Costello, LLC.

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